Writer-scientist's essays bridge the creative gap

Reviewed by Julie Mayeda

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 6, 2005

A Sense of the Mysterious

Science and the Human Spirit

By Alan Lightman

PANTHEON; 209 PAGES; $23

A young Alan Lightman put his writing on the backburner until he became well established in science because he "knew of a few scientists who later became writers ... but no writers who later in life became scientists." Years later and as an MIT professor of astronomy and creative writing, Lightman wrote "Einstein's Dreams," a novel that would become a surprise best-seller. Now a full-time writer with four fiction titles included in his singular curriculum vitae, Lightman must surely be satisfied with his earlier decision.

As are his many readers, for few physicists have demonstrated that rare ability to render their abstruse discipline comprehensible to the reasonably intelligent layperson, and Lightman can be counted among the fewer still who can do so with panache. His latest book, "A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit," is a collection of his more recent essays, several of them previously published in first-rate periodicals, all of them imprinted with Lightman's scientific wonderment and poetic grace.

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come off as, well, middling. After all, their lives have been dissected several times over. What saves these essays from redundancy is Lightman's insider perspective as he contemplates the measure of these great scientists' humanity alongside their accomplishments. A fourth profile, and by far the freshest, has to do with Vera Rubin, an astronomer whose name remains relatively unknown even though she was the first to infer the presence of "dark matter." As if to make up for the world's oversight, Lightman pays her due homage: "Against all odds, Rubin has managed to be a mother and wife as well as an outstanding scientist."

And while Lightman makes note of Teller's "brooding egotism," Feynman's "aggressively unrefined" manners, and Einstein's elitist purview, Rubin is to Lightman "a woman in love with astronomy." Rubin had at one time remarked, "Doing astronomy is incredibly great fun." Thus, she comes off as the most grounded of the lot and someone you might actually care to befriend.

The remaining seven essays are splendidly illuminating, for Lightman is at his best while contemplating the similarities and differences between the arts and sciences -- and who better to do so? Having experienced what is widely known as "flow" in both his disciplines, Lightman likens it to "planing: "

"The best analogy I've been able to find for that intense feeling of the creative moment is sailing a round-bottomed boat in strong wind. Normally the hull stays down in the water, with the frictional drag greatly limiting the speed of the boat. But in high wind, every once in a while the hull lifts out of the water, and the drag goes instantly to near zero." Only Lightman could make an elegant metaphor out of "frictional drag," although it must have been the scientist-Lightman rather than the writer who did so, for he states in a later essay that, "Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things." Roughly speaking, indeed! Writers do not try to avoid naming so much as they try to avoid oversimplification -- which is more a scientist's inclination.

At any rate, Lightman is unafraid of generalizing and this often works to a reader's advantage. For example, Lightman proffers a look-see into a preoccupation few of us will ever experience, that of a mathematician's. "They imagine worlds of bodies, of whim, of physical substance of any kind. For many, the powdery chalk on their blackboards is all they want of material reality." Though mathematicians are wont to distance themselves from messy humanistic leanings, their own blackboard scribblings can be works of art to them. "A mathematical proof is a beautiful painting in which the viewer is not supposed to see the brush strokes of the artist. That absence and simplicity is part of the aesthetic."

The pursuit of beauty, the experience of "planing" and the desire to snag that perfectly apt metaphor, these are traits that scientists and artists share, though they may not share alike. Having transitioned from scientist to writer, Lightman misses "the exhilaration of seeing brilliant people at work, watching their minds leap right in front of me, not the brooding intelligence of writers, but an immediate mental agility, pole vaults and somersaults and triple axels on ice." It does appear that Lightman prefers science to writing. He is not compelled to return to his first career, however, for he now knows for certain what he suspected as a young man, that the "limber years for scientists, as for athletes, generally comes at a young age."

In the end, it isn't clear whether Lightman is a lumper or a divider when it comes to the arts and sciences. Perhaps it doesn't matter. What seems to propel Lightman, and what seems to hold these essays together, is his diametrically opposed yearnings to dwell in the mysterious, all the while striving to define it. 